That one Saxon life was our sole victory of the day. I thought Sigtryggr’s ordeal was over, all but for the misery of being baptized, yet when Grimbald was gone to his death Edward struggled to his feet and held out a hand for silence. He looked tired and ill, and I wondered what had happened to the young man I had known, and thought how swiftly he had decayed into this heavy, sullen graybeard. “It is our pleasure,” he said tonelessly, “to seal this treaty by marriage, to bind Northumbria to our royal house with bonds of blood.” He stopped abruptly, evidently out of words, and just sat. And I could do nothing but stare at him in amazement. Marriage? No one had spoken of marriage, and the ashes of Sigtryggr’s queen, my daughter, were scarce cold, yet Edward was offering a bride?

Then there was a stir at the door, spearmen marched in, and behind them came Æthelstan, and on his arm was the girl we had seen on the cart. I recognized her then. She was Eadgyth, Æthelstan’s twin, whom I had last known as a child. She walked with a straight back, head held high, but her pale face was a mask of misery. Sigtryggr was wrong, I thought. She was not ugly. Her long face, like Æthelstan’s, was strong, and her eyes piercing, but her unhappiness and the grim set of her thin lips made her look plain. Æthelstan stopped with his sister a few paces short of the rearmost bench, evidently waiting for a summons.

“It is our joy,” Hrothweard spoke again to Sigtryggr, “and in the knowledge of your queen’s sad death, to offer you as a bride the Lady Eadgyth, the beloved daughter of Edward, Anglorum Saxonum Rex.”

And with that, Æthelstan walked Eadgyth forward through the benches of watching men who, I think, were as surprised as I was. Eadgyth was to be a peace cow, a bride to seal a treaty, and I saw Sigtryggr’s shock as he began to understand what was happening to him, but I doubted he understood the implied insult in this offer of a West Saxon bride. Edward was giving him his eldest daughter, but she was a daughter whom most men in Wessex considered illegitimate. Hrothweard had acknowledged her as Edward’s child, he had even called her beloved, which was stretching the meaning of love, but he had deliberately not called her a princess. And she was old for marriage too, very old, at least in her middle twenties, a bastard royal, an unwanted girl, an inconvenience, and she had been fetched from whatever nunnery had presumably sheltered her, to marry a Northumbrian king whom everyone in the hall knew must eventually be slaughtered by Saxon swords. No wonder so many men smirked and even laughed as Eadgyth walked toward her doom.

But Eadgyth would become a queen, Sigtryggr would swear fealty, the priests would baptize him before they harnessed him to his peace cow, and Northumbria was humbled.